Athena Andreadis has unveiled the cover art for To Shape the Dark along with the full ToC. I eagerly look forward to the release date when I can finally get my hands on this wonderful anthology. Andreadis’s sharp eye and close to perfect sense for story promises a volume worthy of accolades and recognition.

There still six days left to help Strange Horizons reach full-funding. Check out the site and while you’re at it, check out Kari Sperring’s excellent Matrilines column. This week, she writes about Evangeline Walton.

A murder mystery set in a ruined Paris under the rule of Fallen angels, The House of Shattered wings is the first the Dominion of the Fallen series. Sweeping and evocative, Aliette de Bodard’s skill as a writer and her gift of writing immersive stories are on full display in this first book. We invited Aliette for a conversation not just around her novel, but also on her journey and her growth as a writer.

(Photo courtesy of Aliette de Bodard)

When you look back at the Aliette de Bodard who started publishing fiction in 2006 and the Aliette de Bodard who has got a number of novels under her belt, what for you are the primary standout differences that you see?

Well, the most obvious answer is that I’ve become a (hopefully) better writer! Part of it is craft: learning the building blocks of writing fiction and how to best put them to use. Part of it is confidence: I won’t say I don’t get imposter syndrome, but I’m more aware that I *can* write, and that makes me… more in control, I guess? I’d say it makes me more inclined to challenge myself, but really I’ve been doing that since the beginning–it’s just that the nature of such challenges has evolved over the years, and that the goalposts have shifted from “writing a story that makes sense” to “writing a complicated novella with four points of view that shifts back and forth in time”…

Could you talk about the ways in which your approach to writing and to the work has changed?

One of the things that happened was that I became more aware of myself and where I was coming from; and that I had been circling the writing of fiction based on Vietnamese/French culture for a while because I was worried of a. not coming across as “authentic” enough, and b. getting yelled at by family and friends. I realized that it was fundamentally idiotic to be afraid of writing my own cultures (as we said to each other: if we don’t do it, who will?), and that authenticity was a very fraught word–a policing one that had a tendency to shut people in narrow boxes of the “One Story”, and a fundamentally inaccurate one, for everyone’s experience of their own culture is going to be vastly different!

One thing I also started to do was consciously putting more of my own experience into my fiction, which was downright scary (I’ve been raised with the idea that putting oneself forward is arrogance, and it’s very hard for me to counter this narrative in my head). But I think that it’s a necessary step, in the sense that fiction needs a heart, and that the heart, in some sense, has to be about the author–about something that matters deeply to them, about something that has enough passion to carry across to the reader.

The other thing that happened, I think, is that, as I said, I got the “basic” skills of writing fiction tucked away, which was freeing in the sense that I could focus on the content and on what I wanted to achieve with a given piece, rather than worrying about how to handle too much exposition… I think the very first story where I became aware that all of these things were happening was “Scattered Along the River of Heaven”, which merges a complex timeline and structure (two intertwined storylines interspersed with poetry), with considerations that are deeply personal (war, revolution, diaspora, and what it means for the generations that follow the war).

I’m not saying I’m terribly at ease writing this sort of thing: I always feel exposed, and I was going to send “Scattered…” to a small market for a token payment, until my husband (who’d read the first draft), looked at me and said “this is the best thing you’ve ever written and you’re going to aim low?” (he does the growly voice wonderfully well, I don’t know what I’d do without him).

What were the primary influences behind these changes (if there are any)? Would you talk a little more about them?

It’s a complex thing, I think? Part of it was merely writing a lot, reading a lot and critiquing a lot; part of it was my husband, who’s always been very supportive and kept pushing me to try out new things.

And a big part of it, too, was going back to Vietnam in 2010 for the first time: for me, Vietnam had always been a bit of a mythical land, in the sense that while I knew I had relatives there (and relatives like my grandmother who shuttled back and forth), the family narrative is one of loss; of a country that was devastated past salvaging, and of a diaspora that was doomed to remain abroad. It was… very odd to go there, and even odder, I think, to go with my husband a few years later, because I was explaining so many things to him–that was when I realized that a number of things I took for granted were actually not common knowledge. In the wake of that, my husband encouraged me to pick up Vietnamese again (my Vietnamese used to be terrible, i.e. limited to members of the maternal family and food items. Now it’s… less terrible, at least I hope so!), and I had a lot of talks with family members about history–and, again, about some things that had become family mythology, and that turned out to be more complex than I’d imagined. It certainly… made me think.

It’s been said that we change the work as the work changes us. How has the work changed you and how have you changed the work?

As I said–the work has changed a lot, because I’ve put a lot more of myself into it, and I’ve allowed myself to do a lot of things with it, to take what I would have considered very big risks a few years ago. I don’t think I would have dared to write a novel like The House of Shattered Wings in 2006: the structure is complex, but more than that it’s a portrayal of period France that deliberately includes the colonial history, and I would have felt ill at ease writing it back then.

I think the main way in which the work has changed me is that I’ve become way less apologetic about what I write: there’s a lot of writing advice about picking large-scale events, high concepts, violence-driven plots as the only way to write something successful, and I’ve realized that it’s not the only way, and definitely not the only way for me. It’s not that I don’t write such things; but I like to focus on character interactions, on emotions and familial/friendship bonds–and over all those years of writing I think I’ve finally managed to convince my brain that I should write what I feel I must write–even if it sounds weird, or out there, or completely crazy; because it’s how I write, because it’s what I feel passionate about, and because I can bend myself to the “rules”, but, having tried it, it makes for decidedly crappy stories. And yes, it’s not going to appeal to everybody; but I’ve come to realize that “appealing to everybody” is a codeword for bland, unobjectionable stuff; or at the very least for something that doesn’t challenge the reader; and, just as I like to be challenged when I read, I would in turn like to do that to my readers!

In what ways has the increase in visibility affected the way you approach hot topics such as appropriation, sexism and representation?

It’s really tricky–I was talking about it with my sister the other night: I now have over 6000 twitter followers, and a good number of people who follow my blog direct and my FB, and it’s hard for me to realize that so many folks are paying attention to what I’m saying! I got tagged pretty early on (mainly because I ranted too much, I guess) as an “expert” on non Western Anglo SFF (which is a complicated and fraught concept, but let’s limit for the moment to stuff from outside the US/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ and other majority white, Anglophone Western countries), and this is terribly scary I guess? There’s a whole world of people out there and I certainly don’t pretend to speak for all of them, or even to have an inkling of what all of them are up to!

I’m never quite sure what to say about representation/appropriation: I sometimes feel like I’m having arguments about basic things (like systemic bias in the industry: it looks so obvious to me, especially coming from a field–computer science–which has been… not always friendly to women), and it’s sometimes really wearying to be questioned on things that I take for granted: I’m not writing Vietnamese characters in my stories to make a political statement or win awards or whatnot. I’m writing them because they ought to be there. I’m writing them because of ten-year-old me, who was so desperate for any characters in SFF that looked like her that she latched on to anyone who had dark hair (you’d be surprised how few characters fit that particular bit).

For me, being “political” shouldn’t include things like wanting people to get basic facts about my own cultures right, or insisting that stories should at the very least attempt to represent the diversity of real, lived life. And I guess that hasn’t really changed with visibility: I’m not about to fall silent or retreat on matters like these.

One of the definite plus point of visibility, though, is that I can boost others, and in particular folks that don’t get much press, which is pretty awesome.

I wanted to ask you about another aspect of your life–about motherhood. How has motherhood affected your work? What are the challenges that you face now that you didn’t have prior to motherhood? I know that women writers often face this challenge and so I wanted to hear from you what you think we need to take into consideration when we contemplate the career traject of women writers.

Motherhood has been weird. I think it’s… possible to ignore a lot of the sexism in the field and in society when you’re not a mother–but the moment you have a child and childcare comes into the equation, there’s all sorts of more or less ugly prejudices that come into play. As a mother, I’m often made to feel like a failure if I don’t live 100% for my child;and I’m expected to provide the bulk of the childcare. And I’m very fortunate in that I have a great family; that my husband doesn’t really believe any of that, quite happily supports my writing, and will quite happily take care of the child while I go off to conventions. But all the same, the societal expectations are there, and they’re pretty heavy; and they’re also so entrenched in the hive mind that it’s *very* difficult to argue against them.

(and also, of course, being pregnant and breastfeeding is very time consuming, and there’s really no way to hand that off to a partner, no matter how helpful they want to be! And, beyond societal expectations, there’s points when children want their mothers and not their fathers, and it really has to be me who comforts him after he’s fallen down, or scraped a knee, or needs to go back to sleep…).

From a pragmatic point of view… well, I think it was Ursula Le Guin who said that babies eat books, and that’s certainly true. There’s less time–it’s normal, as there’s an extra person to take care of. The thing that hit me hardest was the loss of my brainstorming time: I hadn’t realized how much time I spent daydreaming or doodling prior to writing a story, and suddenly that was no longer possible because I had to keep an eye on the child. Surprisingly, actually, revisions and interviews and things that are are… more circumscribed and require fewer brain cells are pretty doable: I managed to keep a pretty fast turnaround on revisions of The House of Shattered Wings, but writing the first draft was like pulling teeth.

I’ve not had issues with publishing, actually (everyone has been consistently great), but there is a thing where writers are expected to produce regular and fairly close together work lest they sink into obscurity–and that’s clearly that much harder when you have young kids at home, and your schedule is liable to take a big hit without a moment’s notice… And there’s the issue of how you network, promote, and go to conventions if you have to stay at home with the kids, and all those things–I see it a lot with young mothers: we tend to just drop off for a while, and I’m not saying it’s a rule or that men are immune to that sort of problems, but the truth is that it’s often very different for young fathers. Again, different societal expectations and biological constraints…

I’m interested in the kinds of complexities that you struggled with as a child of both cultures who has inherited this legacy of colonizer and colonized. Would you like to talk about it?

It’s… complicated (yes, I answer that a lot!). I think a lot of what I grapple with is that colonialism (and its aftermath of wars) was horrible and full of atrocities, and yet that I and many other people wouldn’t be there without it; that the culture itself (the dishes that I love, the language) wouldn’t be the same; in fact that the country itself would be utterly irrecognisable if that hadn’t happened–it’s a history of bones and blood and deaths, and yet, like any history, it’s the one that led us here and made us what we are.

There’s also some mixed race issues in general: genre has a pretty horrific record. One of the only books I ever threw against the wall was one of Lovecraft’s (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, I think?), when the main character goes mad upon discovering he has mixed blood. Terms like half-breed, crossbreed, mutts, are being used in everyday vocabulary to refer to mixed-race people: I find them deeply offensive, and a lot of people don’t even seem to realise there is a problem being compared to animal husbandry (if not to outright abominations). I think a lot of it comes from a US perspective, where miscegenation remained a crime in some states for a long while; but it doesn’t really make it easier or less hurtful when it shows up in random books or in people’s conversations.

One of my favorite things about House of Shattered Wings is how I’m drawn in by your world from the get go. I read page one and boom…I’m totally immersed. What was the most challenging aspect of writing this work and how did you overcome it?

I struggled a lot with the exposition–this is a novel set in Paris in the aftermath of magical devastation, and much as it would have been interesting to see The Great Houses War, this isn’t what I wanted to focus the story on. I was talking earlier about the weight of history, and that is definitely a book that is front-loaded with it; where characters and events only make sense in the light of what has happened before; where it’s important to know how we got there. It’s not obvious to keep a relatively fast pace (with murders and plots and assorted backstabbing) and still juggle all of this in the background!

Who was your most challenging character and why?

I think my most challenging character was actually Asmodeus, the Fallen leader of House Hawthorn? He’s in a position of prime plot mover and in opposition to pretty much everyone. I found him deeply frustrating, because he has reasons for everything he goes, but I’m not in his point of view, and he’s certainly not the kind of person who’ll stop and explain (especially since all the point of view characters either despise him, fear him, or hate his guts). It’s really tricky to have him do what he does and have it make sense, without giving the feeling that I’m cheating the reader! It’s also difficult to render the fact that, he’s actually no better or no worse than everyone else: again, it’s tricky to do when all the point of view characters feel otherwise–and it’s been an education seeing how I can build up a mental image, even from several points of view, that can still be inaccurate or incomplete.

You talked about feeling/being less apologetic and I wanted to revisit that statement again to ask you to expand a little more on it. I know that many of us who come from a non-anglophone and non-US centric culture struggle with this issue among other things. What would you say to the young and upcoming writer who struggles not only with the challenges of getting published and gaining visibility in the field, but who also struggles with use of culture among other things?

I can only speak to my own experience, of course–but it seems to me that one of the things that people from non-Anglophones/non-US centric cultures struggle with is what to do with their own cultures. Because of hegemony, there’s a lot of baggage, and cultures from outside the “mainstream” traditions tend to be devalued even by people who are members of it. I’ve seen, for instance, lots of people set stories in the United States–and it can be totally fine to do if that’s what you want to do, but sometimes it’s simply because you are afraid that your own hometown will be too exotic, or not appealing enough; and because there is a steady stream of Western Anglophone (mainly US) media that is taking over the world and seen as edgy and cool, and that’s what you end up writing because it’s what you’ve been watching that’s wildly successful. And I’m angry–not at the writers (of course not!), but at those who complacently sail through insisting that Hollywood stories are universal, and successful because they’re good (and not because of a marketing machine and a concerted campaign of stifling local industry); as if there weren’t huge cultural biases in place.

But mostly what I would say is: your culture is your heart. Don’t let anyone tell you what to write or how to write beyond matters of craft (and again, if your writing involves writing outside of your culture: do so! Just be aware why you’re doing it, because hegemony can be quite insidious). And be aware it’s a delicate line to walk between learning the fundamentals of storytelling, and being convinced that there is only one right way to do it. You need to hone your skills and learn how to be a better writer, but not lose yourself in the process (and I realize that’s easier said than done, and that it took me years to get to this point). And, also: it will get better. The field is changing at a positively rapid pace, and there’s more and more space for people beyond the Western Anglophone world. I’m not saying it will be a smooth and easy ride, or that there will be no prejudice, or no moment when you want to bang your head against the wall. But you’ll get through this.

(and now I feel really ridiculous giving writing advice, lol)

I know that you’re very much involved in a lot of mentoring and supportive actions behind the scenes. How important are these activities to you? Do you consider them as being essential? If so, why?

I know I felt very isolated when I was starting out–I was living outside Anglophone countries, writing in a second language and coming from different traditions to the majority ones. I learnt a lot of things from the writing communities I was part of, and made lots of friends–and I want to pay that forward. Again, from experience, I know how useful it can be to have people you can turn to for advice and experiences; and I feel you benefit from them at any stage of your career (well, at least the ones I’ve seen so far. I’ll let you know when I get to super-stardom :)). I think mentoring and support are very important activities, and they’re especially primordial the more isolated and further away from the mainstream people are.

I know that we’ve spoken before on the need for support and community. What role does this play in your own writing life and career?

Well, for starters I don’t think I’d be there if I hadn’t had some tremendously supportive friends! A lot of my writing is staring at a draft and being utterly convinced that it’s rubbish and unsalvageable, and I need people to tell me that a. it’s not, and b. how to fix it. I also feel, coming back to the motherhood aspect of things, that I have to give a shoutout to my husband, who not only plods through my drafts and ruthlessly annotates them for logic problems, but also kindly takes care of the child when I need to hammer out something or urgently be somewhere.

Name five books on your bookshelf that you revisit again and again? Why these books?

It depends a lot on my mood! But I reread Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings (and subsequent books in the Lymond Chronicles) every few years, because they’re wonderfully erudite historical with a larger-than-life main character, a compelling love story, and one of the most gut-wrenching scenes that I’ve ever read (at the end of book 4, if you’re wondering). I also reread Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, because Pratchett has been such a source of inspiration, and I think this is one of the best Discworld books–which is both a hilariously funny take on Christmas and also a very sharp and pointed one. I’ve also read Nguyen Xuan Hung’s “Tales from Vietnam” cover to cover a dozen times; because it’s a slim book, and yet one that is surprisingly packed with stories that I find myself returning to, again and again. In epic fantasy, I have a bit of a weakness for Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker, which tackles subjects like faith and belief and heroism (and has a pair of kickass heroines). And finally, I regularly reread Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, which is full of no-nonsense writing advice and techniques (and there’s a recent second edition that’s been completely overhauled).

(and, hum, I’ll throw in a sixth one for free: Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, which is just a treasure trove of facts about food!).

I want to thank Aliette for taking the time for this blog conversation. On the internet, you can find her at http://aliettedebodard.com. Follow her on twitter @aliettedb.

Visit Aliette’s website for excerpts and for links to stories set in the Dominion of the Fallen universe.

Sorcerer to the Crown is the first book in a historical fantasy trilogy. This novel which marks Zen Cho’s debut, while described as a cross between Georgette Heyer and Susanna Clarke is very distinctively Zen Cho. The novel might rightly be called a novel of manners, but Cho escapes being didactic and offers us a world that is engaging and brings to life the very real dilemmas that overcome those of us who must maneuver through complex situations in life.

Tor.com carries an excerpt from the novel, which you can check out by following this link. I’d like to say thank you to Zen for taking time out of her busy schedule so we can bring this conversation to you on PUSH.

(Photo by Darren Johnson / IDJ Photography)

I want to say here that I’m utterly charmed by Sorcerer to the Crown. I’m so excited by your voice and by your ability to tell a story with depth and with such a deft and light touch. It’s a rare gift and I’m glad for your voice in the world.

It’s not an easy thing to be able to balance the serious and the light in any particular work. I’ve watched you do it in The House of Aunts and here, in Sorcerer to the Crown, I see you doing it again. (You have my admiration because I don’t know many who can do this). What was the biggest challenge for you in writing Sorcerer to the Crown and how did you overcome it?

There were a lot of challenges! I was in the process of working out how to write a novel, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. That should be in the present tense, to be honest, because I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing … But with Sorcerer to the Crown, the process of writing a first draft and then a second draft and then revising that multiple times was very new. I think the hardest thing about the proess was just keeping at it — pushing past the fear to try new things with the story, until I hit on something that worked.

Of course, there are lots of improvements that could still be made to the book, I’m sure, but you do have to step away from the work and declare it finished at some point.

With the story itself, striking the balance between the serious issues I didn’t want to gloss over and the fun stuff was definitely a worry. It was very important to me to focus on characters who aren’t usually the focus in the Regency romance genre — people at the sharp end of imperialism — but that brings along baggage. It made the story more interesting — there was never going to be a version of Sorcerer that was about a rich white guy — but of course you feel a responsibility not to seem to play things down. At the same time I was determined that it should be a fun book. The books I personally love best are the ones that put you in a good mood when you’ve read them, without sacrificing substance, and that’s the kind of book I want to write. So that was an interesting tightrope to walk!

I find myself very interested in your choice of setting as well. What were the particular challenges of setting this novel in this time period and what lay behind your choice to do so?

I just like Regency England as a setting. A lot of my favourite writers have used it: Patrick O’Brian, Susanna Clarke, Naomi Novik, Georgette Heyer … I enjoy the language especially, the way sentences are constructed, and the way you can play with the social norms.

This is a fair question, but I wonder how often white Americans get asked why they set their books in Regency England!

You have to do a bit of research when you write about a historical setting which is so familiar to fiction readers — people already have a certain vision of Regency England and you need to be careful about your worldbuilding details. I read a lot of history while writing the book, but I enjoy that so I wouldn’t call it a challenge.

Actually two things annoyed/annoy me about the setting, which are less about the book and more about me. Firstly I felt compelled to read a lot of period fiction and diaries, letters, etc. of people who lived at that time, and while this is something I enjoy, it did mean a lot of my reading time was taken up by white people. I’m quite behind on contemporary SFF because I just don’t have the time to fit it in with all my writing-related reading.

The second thing is that you can write about non-white people in Regency England, and you can even write about communities of colour in Regency London and probably other places, like Bristol and Liverpool. But the particular setting and story I chose inevitably meant that most of the supporting characters were going to be white. That’s on me, but it bothers me a bit.

I know that we all come to SFF through various means and we have varying canons. Your work has been compared to authors like Georgette Heyer and Susanna Clarke. Are they part of your canon? Who are the authors/works that mark your entry into SFF?

I don’t know if I’d call either of them canonical for me, though I like Heyer’s books and love Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I came to them relatively young, but maybe not young enough for them to have entered my canon. That was pretty much closed after age 16 …

The authors that marked my entry into SFF are probably: Tolkien, Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones and Edith Nesbit for fantasy; Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin for science fiction. And the 19th century authors I grew up reading, like Austen and the Brontes. They don’t write genre, obviously, but as a kid in 20th century Malaysia, I read them as one reads genre — as windows on an alien world.

I love that you wonder as to how many white Americans get asked about their decision to set their work in Regency England as I have read my share of books written by white Americans set in Regency England and have often wondered how true those depictions were to the setting and time. (How many Dukes exist in England? At a certain point, I wondered if the UK was made up of nobles only.) So it’s interesting to me to read about the process you went through in choosing this setting as well as the dilemma you faced. I do love that you chose to write Zacharias and that you don’t flinch from presenting to us the complexity of maneuvering through a society where he is a minority.

You wrote about your complicated feelings with regards to your particular choice of setting because of your supporting white cast. Have you come to a resolution regarding those feelings? Do you intend to address this in the following books? Can you tell us without spoiling much? 😉

The feelings aren’t that complicated — I just made a decision some time ago that I should invest most of my time and energy, as a creator, in stories that are not about white people, because I’d spent so many years before that invested in stories that focused on white Westerners to the exclusion of every other type of person. In writing Sorcerer I was obviously trying to avoid producing the latter type of story, but you can’t challenge a thing without focusing on it. So my feelings are like, “This is annoying, but I had reasons for doing it, and you can’t do everything with a single trilogy.”

Is that a resolution?

I think it’s quite healthy to live in a state of slight tension with oneself.

I’m not going to address the issue in the next books really — as I said, I think it’s something that comes with the setting and the type of stories I’ve chosen to tell, which are inspired by the tropes of Regency romance. It’ll have to wait for the next series!

Maybe this comes back to that issue of striking a balance between the serious and the fun. As I said, I enjoy the tropes of Regency romance, the elopements and the inns and the banter and the parties. And maybe playing with those tropes doesn’t fit with one of my projects, which is writing stories set in worlds where whiteness is not a bigpresence, but then that’s only one of my projects. Something like Zacharias’s story, where he’s just this guy growing up alone in a white society, without a black community, is a story worth spending time and energy on.

One of the things that I wanted to ask as well, concerns your own position as being probably the first Malaysian writer to write a major fantasy trilogy. Does this carry particular stresses for you? We’ve spoken before of the burden of visibility and of representation or being seen as a representative. How do you feel about this and what do you think or feel needs to be addressed regarding this matter?

Am I the first Malaysian writer to write a major fantasy trilogy? If we say trilogy, maybe … there’s Yangsze Choo whose YA fantasy novel THE GHOST BRIDE was an Oprah Book of the Week pick. Heights I don’t dare to dream of!

I do feel a certain pressure. In an interview I did with David Barnett for the Independent, he calls me an “unwitting poster girl” for diversity in SFF and it’s probably just as true to say “unwilling”, haha. I feel a bit like that about my position in the Malaysian writing community, like — I’ve just been here toodling along doing mything, and suddenly there’s this whole other side of me that I don’t even have a full picture of, which is people’s perceptions of me.

I get it from both the Westerners and the Malaysians, of course. Western SFF asks me about Malaysian SFF, and I’m like, honestly, apart from the slush reading I did for Cyberpunk: Malaysia, I’ve been spending the past two years in Regency England, what do you want from me.

The Malaysians are very supportive but sometimes they’re very annoying as well! Like any community you have disagreements and even bickering, but I don’t necessarily feel I can engage in that. Like if I’m snotty to someone on Facebook, maybe they’ll worry that I’ll turn my US/UK publishing contacts against them. (Not that I have that power, obviously, but you know as well as I do that people often have strange ideas about publishing.) But maybe I’m just being perasan (full of myself)!

To an extent any burden I feel comes from how I choose to engage with the communities I’m a part of, as much as from how they choose to treat me. I’m lucky to be able to move between worlds in this way — it’s as rewarding as it is occasionally stressful.

Talking about the issue of diversity, when you look at genre today, what do you see as being the biggest challenges facing writers coming from the margins? And what kinds of conversations and actions need to take place in order for genre to become a more welcoming and inviting space for writers coming from traditionally marginalized spaces?

I often feel the biggest challenges are internal. That probably comes from my privileges — there are serious external challenges, like illness and poverty and the stresses that come from that, which will affect the marginalised disproportionately and are a huge obstacle to creativity. Put very simply, though, you need support and resources in order to be creative — including emotional support, and resources like time and emotional energy — and being from a marginalised group by definition means you have less access to support and resources.

That’s the first challenge, to link up writers from marginalised backgrounds with the support and resources to enable them to do the work, and then after that it’s a matter of getting the work out there and getting people to read it and appreciate it. I think US/UK genre has become more open to “diverse” writers and writing; there’s a genuine interest in reading work from countries outside the US/UK and hearing voices that have been historically shut out, but at the same time, people are quite lazy. That sounds harsh, but I include myself in it — your tastes are shaped by what you’ve read and watched before, and it takes a little effort to understand stories that use a different voice, that follow different storytelling conventions, that are trying to subvert the dominant paradigm. There’s a quite large group of people who are “yay diversity” in theory, but I think the number of people who have then said to themselves, “OK, if I’m committed to this, I need to start reading outside my comfort zone and making an effort” is maybe a little smaller.

I am not an activist and I don’t really have any bright ideas for addressing these issues that other people haven’t already come up with and are doing. I think we need numbers — we need lots of writers from the margins because then at least the burden of representation is shared! And we need a couple of bestsellers, to convince the industry of the commercial viability of our work. The best way to persuade the powers of be that we matter is to have some power ourselves!

Aside from novel writing, you’ve also authored a single-author collection and edited Cyberpunk Malaysia. But before these things even happened, you’d published The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo (still one of my most memorable reads). What was it that prompted you to publish Jade Yeo and offer it online for free? What are the advantages/disadvantages (if any) of doing this?

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is an awkward length — it’s a non-speculative short novella, around 23,000 words — and there just weren’t that many markets to submit it to. I submitted to one digital press and got rejected, so I thought, why not self-publish as an ebook? Romance is way ahead of any other genre when it comes to self-publishing — the readers are there. And I thought it would be good training to learn how to format the file for self-publication and work out where to sell the ebook and so on.

At the same time that I self-published the story as an ebook, I posted it online for free on my blog because at the time I’d just launched my website, zencho.org, and there wasn’t a huge amount on it that was new. I felt I should offer people something so they’d come and have a look at the site.

I wasn’t looking to earn a lot of money. I expect there are other approaches that would have been better for maximising profit. There’s also not a lot of prestige to self-publishing unless you sell bucketloads, though it isn’t as stigmatised as it was before e-publishing became a thing. The main thing I wanted to do was get more readers and I think it probably worked for that. People do still buy the ebook and come up to me at cons and say how much they enjoyed it, which is really beyond my expectations.

Your single author collection Spirits Abroad won the Crawford Award. It sounds like a fabulous award, btw. What was it like for you? How did you feel when you were told that you’d won it?

Happy, of course! It’s funny in a way because these awards always feel like a bit of an anticlimax at the time I’m told about them. I immediately start thinking about how little I’ve done to deserve an award, it has been months since I’ve written a story I can be proud of, I am a big fraud and will never do anything good again, etc. etc. (I mean, not that I’ve won a lot of awards, but I had a similar reaction when I was told I’d been nominated for the Campbell.) Of course this is way more about me and my neuroses than about the awards.

I do start enjoying the award later, once I’ve got over the reaction. And actually winning the Crawford Award was nice from the get-go, despite all the stupid voices. I just suddenly felt like I must be a real writer if they were willing to give me the Crawford.

I haven’t yet read Cyberpunk Malaysia, but I’ve heard lots of good things about it. I remember how enthusiastic about this when we were at Worldcon, but we didn’t really get to talk about it after that. I’m really curious as to what goes into putting such an anthology together. Would you talk about the process of putting this anthology together. How do you make decisions on stories to publish? I’m thinking there must also be some difficulty if you have to turn down writers you know, how did you deal with this?

I don’t think I quite knew what I wanted the anthology to look like when I started reading the submissions for Cyberpunk: Malaysia, but I did know what I liked, so I picked stories that I liked. It’s been impossible for me to read reviews of the anthology, actually, because I feel so tender of the stories that I get really defensive — almost worse than I am about reviews of my own fiction!

I ended up with more stories that I liked than I could use in the anthology, so that’s the stage at which I started thinking about what I wanted the focus and the flow of the anthology to be. Though I tried to avoid too much repetition, I deliberately picked stories that echoed and built on each other thematically. This is also the stage at which I started looking at the identity of the authors and the protagonists, to try to ensure a balanced Table of Contents.

I did worry about the fact that the Malaysian Anglophone writing scene is so small that it was inevitable that I’d be passing on stories by writers I know and want to support. But I didn’t find that it was a problem once I started reading the submissions. Who the writers were didn’t get in the way, because I really did just focus in on my experience of the story. I read at least half of the submissions twice, though, because I wanted to be sure that I was giving every story a fighting chance on its own merits.

Hopefully the writers whose stories weren’t included in the anthology get that it is what it is, and it doesn’t mean I dislike their work. But honestly, at the end of the day, my job was not to protect their feelings. My job was to put together an anthology that was as good as I could make it.

What are the top three things you would say to writers who are just starting out?

Find your joy and write the things you like. Don’t worry about the market or anything like that. There’s always space for a good story.

Keep going. Be prepared for long periods when all you hear is “no” and it feels like nobody cares about your work. Everyone goes through this, including the most successful writers you’ve heard of.

Publication is nice, but ultimately it does not matter. When rejections get you down, remember that nothing can take writing away from you.

Aside from the trilogy you’re working on right now, what other projects do you have in the works or what projects do you want to work on next?

I have a fairly demanding day job and I’m still doing some promo for Sorcerer to the Crown, so it’s enough of a challenge reserving sufficient energy for writing the trilogy! All my writing energy is going into book 2 at the moment. I’d like to write a novella at some point — I’ve got a couple of ideas that might do — but when I’ll get the time for that, I don’t know.

Finally, where can we find you on the internets. 🙂

My website is http://zencho.org — it has information about my books and where you can get them. I’m zenaldehyde on Twitter and Instagram, and zenchobooks on Facebook — my Facebook account is public, but if you’d like to be added, do drop me a message letting me know who you are.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Zen Cho. Click on book covers to follow links to the books. We’re sharing both the UK and the US covers here as I think they’re both so pretty. Thank you for reading and thanks again to Zen for taking the time out for this conversation.